KQED Lacks Balanced Reporting on Culture Issues

KQED Public Radio in San Francisco gives a very distorted view of today’s culture in the Bay Area and across the country. As a regular listener, I know this is true.  From the time I get up in the morning until about 5 pm, I listen to KQED. I hear everything from all the news reports, talk shows, book reviews, movie reviews and more.

What I notice the most is the bias reporting on minority communities such as African-Americans, Latinos and European-Americans (whites).  Listening to all the reports a listener could be left with the impression whites are loaded with money, educated and don’t face problems blacks and Latinos struggle with such as poor education, low wage jobs and discrimination.

This is not an accurate reflection of what I have witnessed in the Bay Area or across the country. For example, there was a report about a poor section of L.A.  where obesity is high and the reporter indicated that the reasons for obesity in the poor areas was because they were filled with fast food restaurants and the small markets that didn’t carry fresh high-quality food.

When I hear these reports I always think back to my life as a kid growing up poor with a single mother. We were on welfare, Medicaid and the federal government paid for our rent. In our neighborhood, we had two corner stores and one was attached to a bar. The tiny market was loaded with alcohol, sodas, chips and plenty of other junk food. And this was an all white poor neighborhood.

Occasionally, my mother would have me pick up milk at the corner market, but the majority of our grocery shopping was done at a grocery story across town. Sometimes we had a car to get there, sometimes we didn’t. When we didn’t have a car, my mother was able to find a relative or friend take us shopping.

With food stamps, you can buy high-quality food just as easy as junk food. Honestly, corner markets are not excuses for obesity. There is always a way to reach a grocery store, even if by bus. And there are healthy options at the majority of fast food restaurants these days such as salads and grilled chicken breast sandwiches. Just tell them to hold the cheese and mayonnaise.

Listening to KQED you’d get the impression that only minorities lived in poor sections of town while all the whites enjoyed the luxury of Nob Hill.  This isn’t true. Poverty does not discriminate. And any race or ethnicity can be a victim of discrimination.

When I first moved to San Jose in 2000 from Ohio, I lived on the east side of the city in an apartment complex, with a large Latino neighborhood on one side and a huge Vietnamese neighborhood on another. One time I went to get a membership at a local video store owned by Vietnamese.

While standing at the counter, the Vietnamese guy behind the counter kept helping the other Vietnamese behind me in line. He totally ignored me as the other Vietnamese customers stepped up to the counter nudging me to the side. I couldn’t believe that “accepting” California would now discriminate against whites. But you’d never hear a story like that on KQED, but if the issue were reversed it would make headline news. Sure, this was an isolated case, but isn’t all discrimination?

Once I heard on KQED a reporter interviewing a Latina about her job cleaning houses. She had hope her daughter could go to college and not clean houses for a living. But the reporter betrayed house cleaning as a demeaning job. When my mother had a job, she cleaned houses. She had a lot of pride in her work as a house cleaner considering herself a cleaning expert. My mother never considered it demeaning work.

But house cleaning didn’t pay well and there was no health insurance and the job didn’t offer a steady paycheck. If a family started to struggle financially, the cleaning lady was the first to go.

The low wage and unpredictable income kept us in a poor neighborhood. I attended the worse schools in the state and graduated from high school at a ninth grade reading level. And yes, I’m white.

As a business reporter here in the Bay Area, I have interviewed many minorities in high positions at Silicon Valley companies  - African-Americans, Latinos and women. These are people who didn’t use their race, gender or income as an excuse for failure.

One Saturday, KQED went to a high school in San Francisco to interview teenagers about their challenges in today’s environment. One Latino student said in summary that society sends a message that Latinos are not meant to be successful, therefore Latino students fail on purpose. Well, that’s a ridicules statement. I have met many many successful Latinos who are in high profile jobs such as corporate executives, doctors, lawyers and politicians.

A few years ago, there was a report on TV about one black family that lived in the projects, I believe it was Chicago, who had a mother that was determined to give her kids opportunities. To that end, all four of her kids were successful, one was a doctor, one was a lawyer, one was a politician and another was a small business owner. Success is not just about color or money, it’s also about attitude and ambition. But you won’t hear that on KQED.

Once again, KQED only seems to focus on what’s wrong with society and betrays an image of minorities that is far outdated. Rarely do they report on what is working right. During this report about teenagers a professional who works with teenagers said kids aren’t eating dinner with their family these days, instead they are eating a TV dinner and going to their room to play video games or chat online.

Hello, I did something similar back in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember getting a lot of TV dinners, especially toward the end of the month when my mother ran low on food stamps and that’s all she could afford. You could get a frozen meal at that time for under $3 each. And I would have loved Facebook as a teenager. It would have given a way to talk with other gay teenagers. Instead, I didn’t have anyone to talk with about my sexuality and I never felt more alone in my life. Living vicariously through the lives of teenagers I work with here in Silicon Valley, high school is far better today, at least for gays, than it was in the early 1980s.

KQED needs to stop portraying minorities as the only victims of poverty, low paying jobs and poor education. And at least occasionally report how our lives have improved over the years rather than focus on everything that is wrong. As we know fire can be our friend or enemy depending on how it’s used. Technology is the same.

Reporters should always have a balanced story and put the issue in perspective. But when it comes to culture, KQED falls flat on their face. Success is available to anyone who wants it bad enough, regardless of his or her ethnicity, race, gender or financial background. And again, blacks and Latinos are not the only groups who suffer in poverty.

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